PS 3543 
.E135 
P8 
1922 
Copy 1 



ABU BEN ALADDIN: 
A JUST-SO NIGHT 



BEING A PAPER READ BEFORE THE ENGLISH CLUB OF 
UNION COLLEGE AT ITS SECOND ANNUAL BANQUET 
HELD IN THE ROSE ROOM OF THE TWENTIETH CEN- 
TURY LUNCH IN SCHENECTADY, NEW YORK, ON THE 
TWENTIETH DAY OF DECEMBER, M DCCCC XX 



BY 

JOHN N.VeDDER, M.A. 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THERMODYNAMICS 
IN UNION COLLEGE 




AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS 

AT THE SNAIL'S PACE PRESS 

1922 






i*?r 6 h\ 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
FRANCIS H. FODES 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



U 6 74 7 22 



JUN24 72 



Cr2 



ABU BEN ALADDIN 
A JUST- SO NIGHT 




NCE upon a time there was 
an Arab whose name was 
Abu ben Aladdin. He 
lived in Arabia, or to be 
more definite in that part 
of Arabia which is infelici- 
_ tously called Arabia Felix. 
Now Arabia Felix is a trackless desert. In the 
respecl: of being trackless it resembled J^ew 
Tor\ State after Charlie Hughes' famous 
anti-racing camjpaign, but as this is the only 
respecl: in which it ever resembled Kiew Yor\ 
State, there is little chance of confusion here. 
It might however be confused with Boothia 
Felix, which is also a trackless desert ; but as 
Arabia Felix is very hot and Boothia Felix is 
very cold, the two places should be carefully 
distinguished. All possibility of falling into 
the endless chain of error and misapprehen- 
sion which might arise from confounding the 
two may be avoided by the simple mnemonic 
device of associating the F in Arabia Felix 
with the word Fire and carefully guarding 
against the formation of a similar association 
in the case of Boothia Felix. 



4 ABU BEN ALADDIN : 

Abu had many wives, among whom there 
was one who had a name which if transliter- 
ated into English would look like the name of 
one of the complex methylated diazo com- 
pounds of organic chemistry, and when pro- 
nounced would sound like an exceptionally 
long line of a Pindaric ode read metrically. 
We will therefore call her Josephine for short. 
She was more precious in Abu's sight than 
any of his other wives, to say nothing of his 
concubines and of course the less said about 
them the better. 

Now Abu had many possessions, but the 
larger part of his wealth consisted of an enor- 
mous herd of finely bred camels, in which he 
took great pride. They were fed on the choi- 
cest fodder that the country provided I which 
is not saying much), and when the store of 
dates and cocoa-nut oil ran low, he and his 
whole establishment subsisted oncamcrs milk. 

Our hero was a man of a highly reflective 
type of mind. He would often go out from his 
tent, seat himself on a sand-drift, and think. 
He cogitated on such fundamental problems as 
pre-established harmony, the eternal fitness of 
things, and the atomic theory of the universe. 
While so engaged he would often fall into a 
train of ratiocinative thought which involved 
such prodigious cerebration that there was 
distinctly visible around his head an aura 



A JUST-SO NIGHT 5 

which looked like the brush discharge from a 
high-potential electrode. 

One day while evolving a theory of the 
granular structure of the luminiferous ether, 
his thought activity assumed such unusual [vio- 
lence that he did not notice the coming of a 
sand storm and disregarded it even after it was 
upon him. Finally however a terrific gust tore 
up a large piece of slate, which in falling hit 
him on the bean. This aroused him to the con- 
sciousness of an unmistakable disharmony be- 
tween his physical organism and its immediate 
environment. As he started at topspeedfor his 
tent, there arose in his mind a vehement long- 
ing for the flower-spangled shores of the Straits 
of Bab'd'Mandeb, where the coffee-blossom 
spreads its gorgeous petals and the air is ever 
fragrant with the delicate odor of the night- 
blooming jessamine. When at length he ar- 
rived at his tent, he was so exhausted that he 
fell unconscious to the ground. Then Jose- 
phine and her hand-maidens ministered to him 
and laid him on his couch. 

When he awoke the next morning, his ears 
still resounded with the babbling of melliflu- 
ous Bab-el'Mandeb, and he gave orders at 
once to start for its sun-kissed shores. Then 
after a scene of indescribable hurry and con- 
fusion they were at length all mounted on 
camels ready to start the journey. When Abu 



6 ABU BEN ALADDIN : 

gave the word of command, they all stepped 
off at once, simultaneously and together. To 
relieve the tedium of the journey they sang 
many sweet songs, among which were I 'm 
Forever Blowing Bubbles, J\[ot Because Tour 
Hair Is Curly, and Who Put the Overalls in 
Mrs. Murphy s Chowder 1 

On the second day of the journey one of the 
ladies who was riding near to Abu cried, 
1 Look you, my Lord, at yon monstrous beast 
far away in the offing ! Methinks "t is a kanga- 
roo, or a dinosaur, or peradventure a niffty 
udellum." 

Then Abu looked, and as he looked he 
smiled; but the lady was smit with sore amaze, 
for Abu's countenance usually bore a rather 
sober and subdued expression such as you 
would expecl: to see on the face of one who 
during twenty years of solitary confinement 
had meditated on nothing but judgment, con- 
demnation, and the second death. He an- 
swered her forthwith, ' Not so, my Lady ; the 
pristine clarity of your intellect is clouded o'er 
by the wild phantasmagorical imagery of a 
fevered dream. What you see is only a wild 
Bedouin coursing over the desert's burning 
sands on his fleet-footed charger." 

After traveling many days, in which they 
covered 647 x io' J micro-millimeters or (if you 
prefer to think in larger units of distance ) ex- 



A JUST-SO NIGHT *f 

adtly 3.17 x io 17 light-years, they were near 
to their destination but not so near that anti- 
cipations of arrival served to assuage the dis- 
comforts of the journey. They therefore di- 
verted themselves with conversation. 

1 My Lord ! ' quoth Josephine, ■ If I remem- 
ber correctly, it was Omar Khayyam who 
wrote the quatrain which readeth thus : 
"And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, 

Whereunder crawling coop'd we live 6? die, 
Lift not your hands to It for help -for it 

As impotently rolls as you or I." ' 

'Thou hast spoken sooth, Lady,' replied 
Abu : 'it was the inimitable Omar, the Astron- 
omer Poet of Persia, who wrote that beautiful 
stanza.' 

' Why do you call him inimitable,' replied 
Josephine, ' for herein he seems to imply that 
we would all admit unquestioningly that we 
roll constantly and unceasingly ? ' 

' The words are figurative/ replied Abu ; 
1 we are all involved in the whirling maelstrom 
of a Bergsonian flux, and it is this which the 
poet has in mind/ 

' But I don t care ! I just don t roll/ insisted 
Josephine. 

Then Abu frowned, and he spoke chidingly 
to her and said, * Cease your carping criticism 
of that which is beyond your feeble compre- 
hension. For you to amend the glorious Omar 



8 ABU BEN ALADDIN '. 

in either form or content would be as i( one 
were to try to enhance the flawless beauty of 
the lily's snowy chalice with a white-wash 
brush and a bucket of red barn paint/ 

This marital rebuke seemed to touch the 
raw of a subconscious Freudian idea-complex 
in Josephine s mind, and she retreated to the 
inner precincts of her own subjectivity. 

And now they were almost in view of the 
watery main— even the much-desired shores 
of the Straits of Bab-el'Mandeb. Then Abu 
said, ' Listen ! Hear you not how the sound of 
the silvery babbling of Bab-el-Mandeb looms 
up in the distance ? ' 

4 But, my Lord,' cried one of the party, ' a 
sound can t loom.' 

1 Well,' replied Abu, 'if I am in the company 
of those who require such punctilious exact- 
ness of expression, I will amend my statement 
and say that the sound behaves exactly like a 
thing which can loom when it is in the act of 
looming/ 

Then they arrived at the shore. But arriv- 
ing at a place bears a close analogy to the at- 
tainment of a limit by a mathematical variable, 
and as we all know, there are many difficulties 
involved in this. Does it really attain the limit 
or only indefinitely approach it ? To decide 
whether they really arrived or not, an analysis 
something like the following is required to 



A JUST'SO NIGHT 9 

establish the necessary & sufficient conditions 
for arrival. Given a definite epoch t, and a cor' 
responding finite distance from the goal d,,it 
must be possible, for any arbitrarily small dis- 
tance d, assigned in advance, to find an epoch 
t, and a corresponding distance d, such that 
d, < d< however small d e may be, the time in- 
terval t, — t a being finite. 

It is thus seen that when, in the play called 
The Highwayman, the principal character, 
Foxy Quiller, walks pompously on the stage 
and, striking an attitude, exclaims in rotund 
tones, ' Something tells me I have arrived,' the 
philosophically minded will not be inclined to 
regard this as mere broad comedy but rather 
as a case of cutting the Gordian knot of logic 
with the shining sword of intuition. 

They then pitched their tents, all the time 
inhaling deep breaths of the perfume-laden air, 
and their hearts were filled with gladness. The 
illustrious citizens of the place greeted them 
kindly and made a great banquet for them, at 
which they feasted many days. But as time 
went on, Abu bethought him of merchandise, 
and he let build great ships, in which he traded 
in camel's hair when the trade-winds were 
blowing, and those who bought the camel's 
hair made it into camel's hair brushes. He 
thought how fitting and reasonable a thing it 
is to trade bv the trade-winds in camel's hair 



10 ABU BEN ALADDIN 

for making camel's hair brushes, nor did the 
thought escape him what an alogical, disjoint' 
ed, and incomprehensible universe this would 
be if real camel's hair brushes could be made 
with no component of camel's hair whatever. 

As his riches increased he caused a great 
course to be built, on which he raced his cam- 
els when he desired recreation from the tedi- 
um of business, and he challenged other noble 
Arabs to match their camels against his. This 
diversion he greatly enjoyed when the track 
was fast, but when it rained it irked him sore 
to see his royally bred beasts slopping through 
the unspeakable mire. This and other incon- 
veniences disturbed his equanimity, but on re- 
flection he concluded that, in spite of all the 
hazards and hardships of finite selfhood, his 
own lot was about as happy as it could be in 
a universe whose fundamental constitution is 
such that no mortal can reasonably exped: to 
get place odds on a two-horse race. 

Thus he lived many years, increasing in 
wealth and honor ; and in the fullness of time 
he was gathered to his fathers, being old and 
full of days. 



Of this edition seventy - eight copies have 
been printed on italian hand -made paper. 
This copy is no. I f 



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